At Sam's, perhaps it's not a three-piece set – a Swiss roll, roast chicken and milk – but a shopping cart with enough food for the whole family.
Recently, some netizens posted a video saying that after visiting Sam's for more than an hour, he saw an adult sitting directly in the shopping cart with shoes on, and he also asked the staff if he could sit in the shopping cart when he entered the mall, and the staff replied "Of course". Searching for Sam's shopping cart on social platforms, the screen is full of posts of "Sam's film" and "how Sam's shoots". Shopping in Sam's seems to have become the new check-in fashion.
Source: Xiaohongshu @ is a fat man (authorized) Why do some people like to sit in a shopping cart? Sitting in a shopping cart to visit the supermarket, the atmosphere is full It is difficult to verify where the wind of sitting in a shopping cart first blew up, but one thing is certain: the shopping cart, with its simple appearance and four-wheel drive core, has advanced to the god in charge of the atmosphere in the current puppet show. Many film and television dramas have famous scenes of sitting in a shopping cart. In "Ignite Me, Warm You", the heroine Zhu Yun, who drank too much, sat in the shopping cart, and the male protagonist Li Xun and his girlfriends supported her one after another. In the next second, Zhu Yun got up abruptly and gave the male protagonist Li Xun a surprise hug, and the ambiguous atmosphere was directly full.
Source: Youku In the Korean drama "Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo", it is still a drunk heroine, or a familiar shopping cart, the male protagonist Jung Jun-hyung uses a shopping cart to send the heroine home, and the confused Fuzhu also comes with the sentence "A little motion sickness, let's go slowly".
Source: Watermelon Video It seems that in idol dramas and romance dramas, one party sits in the shopping cart and the other party pushes, which is not only a symbol of spoiling, but also creates a close and sweet pink atmosphere, which really makes the audience die. Back to reality, why do people always like to sit in a shopping cart? First of all, the most immediate benefit is to save effort. Membership-based warehouse supermarkets like Sam's focus on a tall and bright store, with a single store area of more than 10,000 square meters. In June last year, Sam's Club, the largest single-family store in the Greater Bay Area, opened in Qianhai, Shenzhen, with a total construction area of 62,000 square meters, equivalent to the size of eight football fields. After walking around, it takes five or six thousand steps to say the least, so that some netizens commented spicily, "It is to the extent that walking in slippers will be tired." Secondly, taking the film in the shopping cart is an important part of the "check-in" culture of contemporary supermarkets. For some cyber hipsters, going to Sam's but not taking pictures of hair circles is about the same as never becoming. Huge shopping carts, bright and neat goods, coupled with a slightly light luxury sense of industrial decoration, even if the original picture is straight out, there is a kind of blockbuster texture. Why did the supermarket, which originally bought and sold goods, become an Internet celebrity check-in point? According to the theory of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in the consumer society, things exist as symbolic symbols, carrying unique tastes and social status. Our needs are no longer the needs of the things themselves, but the needs of differences and novelties. In other words, following the trend of taking pictures in a shopping cart may not really want to sit, but just symbolic consumption, which is a display of a certain identity and personality. After all, Sam's is known as the "Happy Garden of the Middle Class". Sitting in the shopping cart and posing with a few Internet celebrity style poses, it seems to be a vane of fashion and trend. Back on social platforms, the subtext is: Look, we're also hipsters. But is existence reasonable? Is there a safety risk in the shopping cart? Shopping carts, quietly getting bigger? One of the prerequisites for taking photos in a shopping cart is that the shopping cart is large and sturdy enough. In fact, the original shopping cart wasn't as big and "fit-in-place" as we see it today. At the beginning of the 20th century, Sylan Goldman, a grocery store owner in Oklahoma, USA, discovered that customers stopped shopping once their hand-held baskets were full or became too heavy. So, Goldman came up with the idea of rolling a trolley. With the help of a handyman, he fastened the wheels to the folding chair and placed a basket on it. And so the world's first simple shopping cart was born.
Sylvain Goldman, inventor of the shopping cart Economists have found that over the past 30 years, there is only one economic indicator that has maintained strong and steady growth: the size of shopping carts in supermarkets. According to an article published in the well-known American online magazine Slate, shopping carts are almost three times the size of 1975.
Shopping cart in 1950 Why is the size of the shopping cart growing so fast? First of all, changes in cart size are closely related to the supermarket's profits. Martin Lindstrom, a marketing expert, points out that if a shopping cart were twice the size of a regular shopping cart, we would buy 40% more than usual. It's not that we need extra items, it's that the bigger trolleys meet our original need to stock up on food. Evolutionarily speaking, we are inherently fond of stockpiling food when it is plentiful. So, if the cart is half empty, we have the urge to fill it. This kind of logic is like: everything is coming, the car is pushed, how can it be worth the lot of time and energy spent on buying more to take away? Secondly, a large shopping cart prevents theft. There is an argument that if the shopping cart becomes larger and stronger, it will be harder to steal the shopping cart again. As strange as it may sound, how could a thief target a big, heavy shopping cart?
But in reality, shopping cart theft has been a problem that plagues supermarkets and grocery stores around the world. According to the Washington, D.C., Food Marketing Institute, stolen shopping carts can cost businesses $800 million a year each year. In the summer of 2021, a Safeway grocery store in San Francisco reported that 160 trolleys were lost in the store in a month, an average of more than five per day. In addition to the size, the design of shopping carts is also quietly evolving and becoming more and more diverse. At present, there are two main types of supermarket shopping carts - European-style shopping carts and Japanese-style shopping carts. The European-style shopping cart is divided into a stand type and a tray type, with a larger storage space, and a child seat is set up in the basket at the same time. Japanese-style shopping carts usually do not have a special volume division, and the common frame of the cart body is a shopping iron frame, on which can also be placed a simple plastic shopping basket.
Source: References[2] However, "big" is also divided into three, six, nine and so on. According to the difference in capacity, the shopping carts on the market are divided into different sizes, 60L, 100L, 125L, 150L, 180L, 240L, etc. The shopping cart capacity of ordinary supermarkets is about 60~150L. The Sam's Club located in Xixi Impression City, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, has a shopping cart capacity of 210L, about one meter high, more than 60 centimeters long, and about 50 centimeters wide, which is enough for an adult to sit. According to a paper published in Industrial Design Research, the load capacity of the herringbone shopping cart is 60kg~160kg (the load capacity of the tray shopping cart is slightly deviated). According to the Report on the Status of Nutrition and Chronic Diseases in China (2020), the average weight of males and females aged 18 and above was 69.6kg and 59kg, respectively. Theoretically, a shopping cart with an adult does not exceed its capacity.
Source: References[2] Children who are much lighter than adults, although there is no problem with the weight of ordinary shopping carts, but the risk factor is not small. The child seat of the shopping cart in the general supermarket in China, with a maximum weight of 15kg, has a rear card door design, but does not have a seat belt or other stabilizing device. For children who are lively and curious by nature, how can a child seat trap themselves, let alone a shopping cart with less complete protective measures. In recent years, there have been many dangerous incidents of children's shopping carts exposed by the media. In 2022, an elderly man in Weifang, Shandong Province, took his 3-year-old grandson to a supermarket to shop, and the child fell to the ground from the shopping cart due to a falling wheel, resulting in a grade 10 disability. Even in Europe and the United States, where restraint systems are installed, children sitting in shopping carts do not mean that they are 100% safe. In 2014, the Washington Post published a report detailing the results of a nationwide study of children's hospitals on children's shopping cart safety and injury risk. Researchers at National Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, analyzed emergency room data collected from 1990 to 2011 and found that shopping cart accidents injured an average of 24,000 children each year, or about 66 children per day. Falling from a shopping cart accounts for more than two-thirds of shopping cart accidents, and other common types of accidents include hitting a shopping cart, falling over a shopping cart, tipping over, and limb trapped in a shopping cart. According to the study, the most commonly injured body part is the head, which accounts for 78.1% of injuries in children. Concussions and closed head injuries (internal head injuries) increased from 3,483 in 1990 to 12,333 in 2011, mostly in children under four years of age, the study said. It can be seen that even though the child is sitting in the shopping cart, parents cannot slack off. It seems to be hands-free, but in fact, the energy is still firmly locked in the small child seat. As for whether the shopping cart can sit an adult, everyone is more concerned about "sanitation or hygiene" than safety hazards. Although supermarkets do not explicitly prohibit similar behavior, no one wants to buy roast chicken, milk, and Swiss rolls that they have worked so hard to buy and eat at home with an indescribable smell. [1] Xia Lin.Analysis of the phenomenon of "punching in" of Xiaohongshu Internet celebrities[J].New Observation on Media Convergence,2023,(05):16-19. Industrial Design Research,2017,(00):235-239. [3] Popular Science China: It's really dangerous to do this in the supermarket! There has been another tragedy recently, so be vigilant![4] Global Times: Netizens called it "disgusting", Sam responded[5] Sanlian Life Weekly: Why are Sam's and IKEA's shopping carts getting bigger and bigger?[6] Interesting report: After visiting the member warehouse supermarket for half a day, I took 500 photos
Author: Min Min Zhang Ziyi Editor: Chen Yanni Duty Editor: Min Min
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